Letters to MoneyWeek: tread carefully with statistics

A selection of letters sent in to the MoneyWeek office, and their replies.

Regarding your article "Insights that won a Nobel" (MoneyWeek 866), while it is time indeed that the myth of Homo economicus was laid to rest, it is prudent nonetheless to approach the results of behavioural psychology research with some degree of caution. Much recent experimentation in the field has been called into question due to the widespread and professionally sanctioned practice of "p-hacking" the unethical manipulation of data in search of statistical significance.

Stuart Vyse, author of Believing in Magic; the Psychology of Superstition and winner of the William James Book Award for the American Psychological Association, writes in the September issue of Skeptical Inquirer, "most studies need to report statistically significant results to have any chance of getting published so everyone is on a quest to achieve the vaunted p (for probability) < (less than) .05 that indicates the findings are unlikely to have happened by chance".

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